CFMEU must choose: thuggery or the law

The leadership of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union would like to exert control over Australia’s largest private construction business to a degree that the law does not allow.

Over the past week, the union has arranged for up to 200 people who don’t even work for Grocon to blockade two of our Victorian sites illegally. This is a massive operation in illegal intimidation in defiance of Supreme Court orders.

This is not employer versus employee. There is no protected action. The CFMEU and Grocon signed enterprise bargaining agreements in June. Having reached agreement, the union is demanding the company pay for CFMEU-appointed stewards on our sites.

This would amount to Grocon paying millions of dollars to people whose lines of control are external to Grocon and whose productivity for it would be open to question.

The last time Grocon accommodated the CFMEU’s demands on the QV project, one in four days was lost due to industrial disputation.

The CFMEU’s main smokescreen for its illegal activities is the bizarre claim that our sites are unsafe. We believe our sites are the safest in the country. We won Safe Work Australia’s Best Workplace Health and Safety Management System award in Canberra earlier this year ahead of 400 companies and in 2011 we won the OHS Management System of the Year from Worksafe Victoria.

Grocon’s workforce is proud of what we create. They work for a company that has built some of the finest parts of the Melbourne and Sydney skylines, from Eureka Tower, and AAMI Park in Melbourne to Governor Macquarie and Governor Phillip Towers and 1 Bligh Street and 161 Castlereagh Streetin Sydney.

Our workforce is proud of Grocon because we live our values of safety, sustainability, community and innovation, and because we pay at or above the industry average and provide superior conditions to retain the best people.

If, as CFMEU leaders claim, it doesn’t mean to condone the level of threat associated with being on the wrong end of a double-barrelled shotgun, then they should work to prevent circulation of leaflets adopting that imagery towards respected Grocon employees. Instead, they go to ground.

We know the blockaders best by what they do each day and what they allow to be done in their names. Individually and collectively, they choose to infringe the rights and peace of mind of others and to prevent legitimate work on some of the country’s safest sites.

I hope there are decent union members on the blockade who are having second thoughts about the violence implied in all their names.

I also hope our community’s business and political leaders are watching this process closely.

The blockades are more than illegal, they are unprovoked, based on lies, and involve a systematic campaign of long-term physical threats.

If the CFMEU is allowed to continue running this illegal blockade and fear campaign that goes with it, it will demonstrate that the system really is not working.

Over the weekend I have been talking to all our Victorian teams about our industry-leading safety practices. They are good, hard-working people. They have a right to go to and from work and to rest in their homes without being fearful.

The CFMEU leadership has a choice. Choose to become a byword for illegality and thuggery or obey the law of the land. Let our people get back to lawful work safely. Please.